Inspiration, ideas and information to help women build public speaking content, confidence and credibility. Denise Graveline is a Washington, DC-based speaker coach who has coached nearly 200 TEDMED and TEDx speakers--including one of 2016's most popular TED talks. She also has prepared speakers for presentations, testimony, and keynotes. She offers 1:1 coaching and group workshops in public speaking, presentation and media interview skills to both men and women.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

(Editor's note: Inside Voice is a new interview series on The Eloquent Woman, in which we'll ask speakers, speechwriters, and storytellers to share their insights. I'm delighted to kick off the series with my client and friend Marcus Webb, who leads the storytelling operation at the TEDMED conference. I've been coaching speakers under his direction for that conference and wanted you to hear how he approaches storytelling and speechwriting. Webb doesn't limit his writing skills to speeches, but also writes screenplays. He's also a frequent tipster to this blog, and gave generous responses to my questions.)Where did you get your storytelling chops?Believe it or not, at
the U.S. Library of Congress. Long
before the Internet arrived, I spent many weekends there (we lived nearby when
I was a kid). Over several years I made
a deep study of speeches by everyone from Cicero to Elizabeth the first, General
Patton and Martin Luther King, Jr. What I discovered was
that the greatest speeches in history have a musical structure and form. They are built on theme and variation,
counter-theme, a climactic reprise and a coda. They include leitmotifs and “melodies.” And that’s just the beginning...
Applying these
lessons in high school public speaking contests got me the opportunity -- at
age 17 -- to share platforms with Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater (addressing
audiences of 10,000 people); to visit the White House and meet the president;
and to pay for college with a single speech (thanks for the generous scholarship,
Veterans of Foreign Wars).

Much later, I learned
some additional secrets of storytelling in public speaking from my boss, Jay
Walker, chairman of TEDMED.

What are the most important parts of a story, for a
public speaker?

Authenticity, that much-overused
word, is crucial. Authenticity means
truth plus vulnerability. Ideally a story in a speech should grow organically
out of the speaker’s personal experience.
And, it should be deeply meaningful to him or her.

The story should not
be something the speaker read or heard, and dragged in to make a point -- or
worse, something they stuck in to emotionally manipulate the audience. Better no anecdotes than a cheesy anecdote!

Do you realize the
best speeches in history (from Cicero to King) contain not
a single anecdote between them? They are
architecture, not argument.

Beyond that, it’s important
to realize that even without using a single anecdote, you can use a “story arc”
to construct a speech.

For example, you
start with a hero, which can be an idea or a product you’re advocating. You open with a first act that describes the
problem. You progress to a second act
that describes the ideal solution. You conclude
with a third act that describes an actual solution or policy or course of
action that conforms to the ideal.

This is just part of
what I learned from Jay Walker. My job
as Chief Storytelling Officer at TEMDED is like attending a perpetual graduate
seminar with “Professor Jay.”

What's something you wish more speakers would include in
their storytelling?

Vulnerability, as mentioned
above. Most speakers resist being
vulnerable. They don’t like to share their failures or
highlight their faults. But doing so is what
makes audiences trust them, and sometimes even love them.What's something you wish more speakers would leave out
of their storytelling?

Blarney! By which I mean, an obvious attempt at emotional
manipulation, especially in the form of stories that are grafted onto the
structure, simply because speakers think they have to tell stories. At worst it’s like welding a bicycle onto a
747.You write speeches for Jay Walker, TEDMED chairman. What
does it take to write for such a frequent speaker?

Occasionally I write
a speech “for” Jay but more often I write a speech “with” Jay. For one thing, it takes a willingness to do
lots and lots of drafts. It’s not
unusual for us to go through 30, 40 or 50 drafts of any important document. But as I said, it’s a constant learning
experience so I enjoy it and benefit from it.

Why so many
drafts? At its best, writing is
thinking. Jay uses the writing process
to evolve his ideas, not just to evolve his expression of them. He is constantly searching for new and better
truths.Do you have a
favorite TED or TEDMED talk? What is it and why is it your favorite?

Of those those that I
helped craft, my favorites are Peter Attia’s 2013 talk and Ginnie Breen’s 2012 talk. What makes them work is the deep
emotional truths that these two gifted communicators were willing to share, in
the context of important and intellectually valuable messages.

Jay likes to say that
a good TEDMED talk gives a “gift” to the audience. Peter and Ginnie passed that test with flying
colors. Peter’s talk has racked up more
than one million views on TED.com. Ginnie’s
speech deserves equally high numbers.If you knew you could not fail, what kind of speech or
presentation would you give? Tell us about the setting, audience, type of talk,
content...

A presidential
inaugural at the West Front of the Capitol Building, of course!

But seriously, folks,
my favorite kind of talk to give is one that combines insight with
hilarity...that informs as well as entertains the hell out of people. That’s very hard to do and I haven’t been
able to do it often.

For an example of someone
else giving this kind of talk, see Zubin Damania’s 2013 TEDMED remarks. I hasten to add that this script and
performance were all Zubin’s doing, not mine.What's your public speaking pet peeve...as a
speechwriter? As a member of the audience?

You mean, aside from plagiarism by presidential speechwriters who blatantly and endlessly lift passages from speeches by earlier presidents, then get praised to the skies for their originality and gifted style?

As an audience
member, my pet peeve is speakers who give you a handout, then read it to you...word
for word. This is particularly deadly in
an office meeting where the audience can’t leave (a long series of school principals
did this to my mother and her colleagues, career schoolteachers, for decades).One more pet peeve: that tired cliché that “some things are too
deep for mere words to express.” If you
can’t figure out how to express it, go hire a gifted writer who can. But don’t blame the English language!

Why is public speaking worth the effort, in your view?

The best public speaking is one-man theater
or one-woman theater. It is electrifying. It is a combination of revival sermon and standup
comedy. It is a declaration of war, a confession
of love, or both. It is Shakespearean
soliloquy, a revelation of the soul, poetry in prose, music in words.

William Faulkner got it right in his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech: “The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it
can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."If you found this post useful, please subscribe or make a one-time donation to help support the thousands of hours that go into researching and curating this content for you.